What Is SRE?

SRE, or Site Reliability Engineering, is a software engineering approach to IT operations. SRE uses software as a tool to manage systems, solve problems, and automate operational tasks.

SRE is useful for creating scalable and highly reliable software systems. Because systems can be managed at scale through code, SRE provides greater scalability and sustainability for system administrators who manage thousands to hundreds of thousands of machines.

The concept was created by Google engineering team member Gen Treynor Sloss.

Benefits of Using SRE

SRE helps teams release new features on time while allowing users to use those features reliably.

Role of an SRE Engineer

SRE is a unique role that requires experience such as being a software developer with additional operations experience, a system administrator with software development skills, or an IT operator.

An SRE team is responsible not only for how code is deployed, configured, and monitored, but also for service availability, latency, change management, emergency response, and capacity management in production environments.

SRE teams can use service level agreements (SLAs), service level indicators (SLIs), and service level objectives (SLOs) to define system reliability requirements and decide when new features should be released.

SRE does not expect 100% reliability and prepares plans for failure.

Differences from DevOps

DevOps is an approach to corporate culture, automation, and platform design that improves business value and responsiveness by delivering high-quality services quickly.

SRE can be considered an implementation of DevOps.

	SRE	DevOps
Main focus	Scalability, operational metrics, automation	Integration of development and deployment processes
Responsible team	Development teams interested in operations	Operations teams interested in development
Metrics	Maximum and minimum values for service level objectives (SLOs)	Mainly system telemetry
Typical adoption	IT service companies in cloud-native environments	Companies moving from on-premises environments to the cloud